“All Me Woman Friends Turn Man”
Althea Romeo-Mark
folktale published in Antigua Stories
Antigua Stories is
a part of the Collecting Memories Project of the Friends of the Antigua Public
Library – NY, Inc. (FOAPL).
The mission of FOAPL is to provide access to
special materials and to ensure that those materials are preserved for the
users of the future and made available to the users of today.
This story is based on an oral tale told by my father Gilbert Romeo, formerly from English Harbour, Antigua. He was our family griot. When I lived in Liberia, West Africa (1976-1990), I was surprised to hear a much longer, version of the story.
The significance of this was very impactful. It is a reminder of the importance of the oral tradition that did not die when West Africans were forcefully uprooted from their shores and taken to the Americas. They were enslaved but their stories and spirits were not crushed. They remained a light within.
“All Me Woman Friends Turn Man”
Gladys and Ernest Hubbard lived on a small Caribbean
island in a tiny village inhabited by farmers, fishermen, and smugglers.
Ernest Hubbard had a reputation for being the village’s strongman. No one ever challenged him to a fight. He was hard-working and left home early to “drive” his cattle to pasture.
At his land nearby, he inspected his cotton plants for weevils, tended his
crops, which included cassava and pigeon peas. He was often away all day
selling his produce.
His wife, Gladys, one of
the most beautiful women in the village, was twenty years younger than Ernest.
She had come from a family of twelve and had married him to escape the brood.
She fixed him a hearty breakfast every morning. At midday, she brought him his
lunch to the land where he was working.
Gladys prepared him various dishes including stew mutton and green bananas, rice and peas or cornmeal dumplings in a thick pot of peas soup, dukanah, and salt fish. After a big lunch, Ernest always drank water from a large jug of water Gladys brought to help him wash the food down.
Gladys was a firm believer that “the way to a
man’s heart was through his stomach” and that “a hungry man is an angry man.”
Gladys kept Ernest
contented but she became bored and restless staying at home alone six days a
week. Most Sundays, Ernest slept all day after church service.
After a hard day’s work, Ernest always stopped at one of the local rum shops on his way home at night. There he would drink, play dominoes, and gossip.
Rumors of strange men
visiting his house in his absence buzzed on and off. At first, he put the
rumors down to jealousy. But the rumors gnawed at him, so one day he decided
to put an end to them. He chose the following Wednesday.
On this day, Gladys’s first suitor, Norbert, arrived at 10:00 a.m. She hugged him warmly and returned to a table where she was preparing a meal.
He watched her slender fingers, covered with flour, roll and flatten the dough to form dumplings. Norbert’s eyes then skirted her tall, dark limbs that glistened with coconut oil. She paused, washed her hands, and uncovered a plate of warm salt fish gravy and dumplings. He dug into the gravy while she prepared more dumplings and was wiping the salt fish gravy that rimmed his mouth when someone knocked on the door.
“Quick, hide under the
bed, Norbert,” gasped Gladys.
Norbert dived onto the
floor, rolled under the bed like a combatant, and was safely out of sight by
the time Gladys opened the door.
“Oh, hello, Leroy, I
wasn’t expecting you today.” She pressed her hand to her chest to control its
heaving. “Er….come in.”
“I was in the area
and…….”
Keys rattled in the
keyhole.
“Jesus, Leroy, hide in
the barrel. I think is me husband.”
Leroy jumped nimbly
leaped into the large wooden barrel standing next to the door and Gladys
clamped the lid on.
The door burst open and
in marched Ernest, snorting and puffing. He surveyed the room and his eyes soon
lit upon the greasy plate of unfinished salt fish and dumplings. Grunting, he
shook his head and glared at his wife.
“Ernest, what you doing
back home,” stuttered Gladys.
“I forget something.”
“You forget something.”
“You deaf, Gladys?”
“No. Is just that you
don’t usually come home mid-morning.”
“I is you husband. I can
come home anytime I want. You eating lunch early?”
“I was feeling peckish and…….”
Another knock on the door
interrupted their conversation. Gladys jerked.
“You not goin’ get the
door, woman?”
Gladys ran to it and
flung it open. “Oh, is you, Mr. Godwin. I wasn’t expecting you ‘til this
afternoon. Ernest, this is Mr. Godwin. He come to take the barrel. It leaking.”
“You didn’t tell me
that,” grumbled Ernest.
“I forget to tell you.”
“Mr. Godwin, there’s the
barrel,” said Gladys, pointing near the door.
Mr. Godwin grabbed the
barrel and tried to lift it. “What you got in here, stone?”
“He, he, he,” Gladys
giggled. “I forget to take the wood out. Now hurry up. I ain’t got all day. I
have to tend to me husband. Go on, go!”
There was no time to
squabble so Mr. Godwin, struggling and straining, heaved the barrel onto his
head and staggered out the door.
Not far from the
Hubbard’s house, Mr. Godwin was still wobbling and stumbling along when a
gravelly voice in the barrel shouted, “Lord, God. That was a close call.”
“What the devil?” Mr.
Godwin, terrified, dropped the barrel and fled, screaming.
“Jumbi, Jumbi in the
barrel.”
It rolled a short
distance and crashed against a rock.
“A dead, a dead,” cried
Leroy, as he climbed out of the splintered barrel and limped away groaning and
checking his body for broken bones.
Back at the house, tears
were streaming down Gladys’s face.
“Ernest, I get some
terrible news early this morning.”
“Gladys, is not the end
of the world,” Ernest grunted.
“The world is really
coming to an end, Ernest,” bawled Gladys. “All me woman friends turn to man.
Come see for yourself. One hiding under the bed right now. She didn’t know
where to turn to. Is a terrible thing, Ernest, a terrible thing!”
Ernest dashed to the
bedroom and searched under the bed. Grabbing a pair of legs, he pulled Norbert
out.
“Wha’ dis?” he yelled,
raising his hands in the air. “Ah wha’ dis?”
Gladys, who had followed,
shrieked, “You see what I tell you, Ernest. You see what I tell you. All me
woman friends done turn to man.
Althea Romeo-Mark, 30.03.2009
https://antiguastories.wordpress.com/joke-stories/althea-romeo-mark/
Part II: This folktale as a poem.
This is a folktale told by my father, told by his mother,
whose West African–captured, enslaved ancestors told her,
too,
to preserve the memory of a lost home.
Perhaps, a cautionary tale to men, if tables got turned.
For it is a story about a woman’s prowess.
I will name her Bella, a woman in whose presence
Men felt entrapped. Was it her beauty or web of words?
Some say it was her cooking that won men’s hearts.
Bella’s husband, a hard-working farmer,
had heard rumors of infidelity, “ah wah dis?”
and set out to catch her in action,
but she, mind limber like a limbo dancer,
had a plan for his every cooked-up plot.
And when a lover knocked in her husband’s unannounced
presence,
she shouted, “oh de man
come fix de barrel”
in which she had hid another lover.
That was two lovers quickly dispensed with.
The man inside boiling, barely breathing, struggling to get
out.
The heavy barrel broke revealing her deception.
Another day, a nearby farmer let slip to the husband,
“One dey now” as he raked soil for planting.
The stinging news prompted him
to fling his hoe down and dash home.
There she sat, skirt spread
across a crate kept for smuggled rum,
while a second lover hid under their bed.
But the smell of salt fish and fungi,
boiled sweet potatoes and okra,
a side dish of dukanah caught his nose.
While he rushed for the kitchen,
where she always prepared meals for many mouths,
she dressed her lovers in women clothing,
and with a river of tears flooding her eyes,
she declared to her husband
upon his return with a piled plate.
“All me woman friends
turn to man.”
Were they her last words? Nobody knows.
For there the tale abruptly ends.
© Althea Romeo-Mark 2018
Poem inspired by Antiguan and West African folktale “All Me
Woman Friends Turn to Man.” This story is also written as a short fiction/tale.
1. “ah wah dis?” –What is
this?
2. “oh de man come fix de
barrel”- The man has come to fix the barrel.
3. “One dey now”—One is
there now.
4. Fungi-polenta, maize,
cornmeal
5. dukanah-- Ducana is a sweet potato dumpling or pudding from Antigua,[1] St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and many other Caribbean islands. They are made from grated sweet potatoes, grated coconut, sugar, flour, coconut milk, and/or water, raisins, ginger, grated nutmeg, salt, and essence or vanilla extract.
This story and poem are based on an oral story told by my father,
Gilbert Elliot Romeo (1914-2009). They are dedicated to him.
Born
in Antigua, West Indies, Althea Romeo-Mark is an educator and internationally
published writer who grew up in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. She has lived
and taught in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, USA, Liberia, England, UK, and
Switzerland since 1991. She is the author of six collections of poems, The
Nakedness of New, If Only the Dust Would Settle, UK, 2009,
English-German; Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer, Liberia 1989; Two
Faces, Two Phases, Liberia 1984; Palaver, Downtown Poets
Co-op, New York, 1978 and Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi: The Silent Dancing Spirit,
Department of Pan-African Studies, Kent State University, 1974, USA.
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